Homefront Devs Expose John Milius As A Fraud

THQ is presently staring into the barrel of a gun called liquidation, the publisher is in serious trouble and one wrong step would see them go under. It was this that resulted in the closure of Homefront developer Kaos Studios. The studio’s dead and buried eve though Homefront wasn’t too bad at all and was certainly interesting but it’s common knowledge that the game was plagued by a wall of problems during development and even now, a year after the game’s release, we continue to hear some of these stories about Homefront’s troubled gestation.

There’s a truly fascinating article on Gamasutra that throws the covers clean off Homefron’t s sketchy development and reveals some very interesting truths. Perhaps the biggest revelation of all within this mammoth article is the fact that John Milius, writer for Apocalypse Now and Red Dawn, did not pen Homefront. This is a pretty big deal considering that the game’s Hollywood pedigree was touted like a trump card. Former Kaos employees told Gamasutra that Milius did not write a single line of the game despite being credited with it.

“Although Red Dawn scribe John Milius is credited with writing the script,” the article says, “multiple staffers tell Gamasutra he ultimately wrote not a word of it, despite the game containing at least 20,000 lines of dialog. Most former employees credit Kaos writer C.J. Kershner with Homefront’s script.” The “high-level story ideas for the game” are credited to Danny Bilson, former THQ president.

This is frankly shocking and you really must wonder what was going on behind closed doors at Kaos and certainly what else they lied to us about? Yes, that sounds paranoid but it illustrates the kind of problems the studio was having and the article illuminates some more of them over its three pages. Not that THQ necessarily knew about this but it is certainly the kind of stunt that the publisher could do without in its precarious position. That’s if it is found to be true.

A Homefront sequel is still on course for development over at Crytek despite the closure of Kaos Studios and THQ’s own turmoils.

Is that why the game’s dialogue is so poor? But then on the other hand, Tom Clancy is definitely not responsible for any of the Tom Clancy games, so why single John Milius out? This sounds like sour grapes to me.

AG_Sonday

Well, Tom Clancy’s games are so named because they are loosely based on books of his. Milius is a different story. Kaos waved him in front of the public to show that they’d brought a real Hollywood writer on-baord for the game and he was credited as doing the writing yet is accused of not writing a single line of the game.